Meet skills shortage with free education

If industry is facing a labor crisis in the skilled trades — and that alarm has sounded for years — then maybe it’s time for drastic measures. It’s time that government provided free training to earn qualified certification in any of those high-value much in demand trades.

The reasoning is simple: A few decades ago a high school diploma was enough to enable a graduate to find a job that paid a living wage — in mining, forestry, fishing, or on an assembly line. Not any more, as offshoring and automation have destroyed those opportunities. Nowadays it takes at least a college diploma to gain a meal ticket into the middle class.

That was the reasoning behind Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign promise of free post-secondary tuition. It’s an idea whose time has come. But we can understand the hesitation. Perhaps, let’s start with some strings attached to the idea and restrict it, initially at least, to free education for those seeking to pursue vocations in high demand. Let’s start with free tuition for trade schools.

Companies like Warner Bodies are to be applauded when they partner with local high schools and colleges to help prepare the next generation of skilled trades people. Industries of all sorts — especially those that rely on skilled trades such as welders, equipment operators, and mechanics — have been warning for years about shortages in those professions.

A big part of the problem is that they’re dominated by baby boomers poised for retirement. And for whatever reason, not enough millennials are entering those trades to keep up with the demand.

Indiana-based Warner’s experience with the Hinds Career Center demonstrates that if you build the right program, aspiring trades people will be drawn to it. Enrollment in the center’s welding program is up 300 percent over last year, as noted in this issue’s cover story on the partnership. About half the students who have completed an internship at Warner through the program have gone on to full-time employment with the company. So it’s certainly something that can be emulated elsewhere.

Other companies, like Stellar Industries and Knapheide, provide in-house training for welders. And trades programs across the country are doing their part — including in partnerships with employers — to bring more people into the trades. Maybe companies should and could do more. After all, they stand to benefit from the increased production and profitability of an expanded skilled workforce. One might say the same about the workers’ themselves; they would surely reap rewards from their investment in education.

Those are all valid points. But under the status quo, not enough companies are investing enough in trades education and not enough young people are getting educated in the trades that are in high demand. Time to try another approach.

Make it an easy choice: Learn to become a mechanic, or mechanical engineering technologist, for free and be able to secure a well-paying job in two years; or pay thousands of dollars for a four-year degree in philosophy that will get you a barista job upon graduation.

Which is not to say that the world doesn’t need philosophers or baristas. It’s just that we have not heard any complaints from employers about a chronic shortage of those vocations.

Tuition is already much less at trade colleges than it is at universities in the U.S. For 2015-2016, the National Center for Education Statistics put the annual tuition at $10,432 for two-year institutions versus $26,120 annually for four-year institutions.

The student loans for trade-school students are already likely to be less onerous than for university students. And the trade school students can begin earning a living to pay back the loans two years earlier. Yet people still aren’t entering these valuable trades in sufficient numbers to meet the demand.

So, sweeten the pot — if only for five or 10 years — and see what happens.

Where will the money come from? From the same source as all the extra money that is supposed to flow into the government coffers after the recent corporate tax cut. Except this might actually work.

Companies will have more qualified trades people to hire so they can expand their businesses, generate more profits, and pay more taxes. More taxes will also come from those welders, electricians and mechanics who will earn twice as much or more than if they were serving coffee or driving Ubers.